Field of the Invention
This invention relates to apparatus for cleaning floors, walls, carpets, curtains, upholstery and the like. It is an object of the invention to provide a dual purpose apparatus suitable for both dry suction cleaning and water extraction cleaning.
Many types of dry suction cleaning apparatus ("vacuum cleaners") are known and there have been a few proposals for combining such apparatus with shampooing apparatus, that is to say apparatus for generating a cleansing foam which is essentially dry in nature in that is requires only a relatively small quantity of water so that a carpet or the like treated in this way is scarcely wetted, but only dampened, the foam being sucked up by the vacuum cleaner which is then adapted to collect the relatively small quantity of liquid incorporated in the foam instead of the normal dry dust.
However, a more thorough cleaning process is that known as water extraction cleaning, in which a carpet or the like is thoroughly wetted by a solution containing a suitable cleansing agent, such as a non-foaming detergent, and the carpet or the like is then substantially dried by uptake of the solution by suitable suction apparatus.